


of erik lehnsherr and beaches

by layersofsilence



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: M/M, fuck i don't know what to call this, idk it's just schmoop, like i wanted emotion but i wasn't expecting what i got u feel, that got unexpectedly emotional towards the end, um
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-28
Updated: 2017-03-28
Packaged: 2018-10-11 23:13:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10476702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/layersofsilence/pseuds/layersofsilence
Summary: Charles suggests a trip to the beach. Erik, for all his misgivings, agrees.





	

Charles first suggests a trip to the beach in bed, on the edges of being sleepy, holding and being held by Erik, galaxies of freckles forming an entire universe that Erik is somehow, impossibly, lucky enough to still be holding. "It'd be good for us," he says, pressing a kiss to Erik's shoulder, gentle. "We can't - we shouldn't let one thing taint our memories of a place forever. I'd like to go to the beach with you, just. For the sake of it." Erik is already guilty of that, of letting his memories stain a place, an entire country. One more thing, one more place where memories whisper too loudly to leave him peace - it wouldn't be so much to him, probably. The world is a big place. But, looking down at Charles, who is looking back up, jewel-blue eyes unafraid and hopeful, he knows it would mean a great deal to Charles, and Erik has long since given up on pretending that Charles's thoughts and wishes and dreams don't influence his actions.

"If you want," he says. "But it's only fair to warn you that I don't - like beaches. Not very much, anyway, to begin with, and after Cuba it's just - it's not -"

(The first reward Shaw had ever given him, for properly obeying, had been a trip to the beach. Erik doesn't like to think about it.) "Darling, I'm so sorry," Charles murmurs into Erik's shoulder. Erik can feel Charles in his mind, warm and soft - just a courtesy on Charles's part, he knows, but he likes it nevertheless.

"Not your fault," Erik says right back, and distracts Charles with a kiss before he starts on his now-worn _sorry isn't necessarily an apology, it can be commiseration, stop trying to deflect_ spiel.

 _I know what you're doing, you know,_ Charles thinks, and Erik lets out as theatrical a groan as possible while keeping it in his mind.

 _The perils of loving a telepath,_ he thinks back, and he is not sure that the giddy joy of being able to joke about it and feeling the small responding smile against his lips will ever fade away. To be fair, the responding smile does not always occur when Charles is kissing him; but in his humble opinion, Charles's smile is always a hundred times better for having been born against his lips.

The next morning, at the breakfast table, Charles raises the idea again, this time to the students: hands moving quickly through the air, striking the most adorable balance between morning-sleepy and excited that Erik has ever seen, at least until tomorrow when he knows the thought will strike him again, even more potent than this time, because Charles always finds something to be excited about in the mornings. He grows more solemn, though, when he looks around at the sceptical faces and slowing movements of some of the students around him. That's how he knows something truly needs issuing, Erik thinks, teenagers have paused in trying to inhale their first meal of the day.

"We need this," he says, plain and simple and so true that nobody can rebut him. "We can’t let one experience define our attitude towards a place forever." And with that, there are nods and mumbles of assent - Ororo, who is the newest and so far only addition to the mansion since after the beach incident everyone is thinking about, asks quite seriously whether Mr Erik will be coming, looking for all the world as though she will take up arms and refuse to go herself if Erik does not, and only settles when Erik nods at her - and a date is settled for the next free weekend, which also happens to be the upcoming weekend.

"We're going to the _beach_!" Ororo says, voice reaching a concerning pitch towards the end of the sentence, and jumps off her chair to run and hug Charles's legs in excitement. Erik can see Charles wince - those legs still sore at sudden movements, despite the best treatments that he can buy, which, with his not-inconsiderable fortune, can probably be classified as rather good. He sends out a probably slightly too-loud thread of concern and Charles just smiles back. _Don't worry about it_ , he sends, along with an honest assessment of how his legs're feeling, which Erik greatly appreciates: nothing held back, between them, even with a subject as fraught with deep whirlpools of emotion as this one. _Just jostled a little. And this chair is very supportive_.

"Mr Erik!" a high-pitched voice says from around his knees. "Do you like the beach?"

"I don't, very much," Erik says, and receives a reproachful look from Charles for his efforts. Around the table, the children are wearing expressions of varying levels of amusement as Ororo positively recoils from Erik.

"But the beach is the best!" she protests, and proceeds to spend the next ten minutes telling everyone, in minute detail, about numerous times her parents had brought her to the beach ("for my birthday, and also a play-date, and on weekends, but sometimes on weekdays too, because it's so good"), and how _fun_ it had been ("so fun!") and how the sand just gets _everywhere_ ("even where you _know_ it shouldn't be, and you just don't know _how_ it got there, but it's okay because it feels funny but in a good way and I get to make it shower and wash it all off!") and the waves are so _pretty_ ("they keep waving! I don't know who they're waving to but it's not me and they keep doing it, and they make the _nicest_ patterns on the sand") and the water is so _salty_ ("and we can't drink it! We can't drink salty water," she says at this point, as though she is delivering pearls of wisdom to the room, "it's not good for us, it makes us go crazy. But just a _taste_ is okay, sometimes").

"Well," Erik says dryly, "after that stirring speech, how could I possibly find it in me to dislike the beach?"

"Ex _actly_ ," Ororo says, in the manner of a girl who has only recently learned the word and is, as a result, using it as often and emphatically as possible.

***

"I am reconsidering my offer to accompany you to a beach," Erik says warily, looking at the minivan Charles has conjured from somewhere.

"Four days notice needs to be given in order to properly get out of anything," Charles says cheerfully. "It's a rule." _And I didn't conjure the van up_ , he sends, _I'm a telepath, not a - what would that even be called? Matter-manipulator?_ His mental voice turns somewhat guilty as he continues, _it was just sort of…there? And very appealing, and sensible, and it wanted to be bought._

"It is not a rule," Erik says, still looking at the minivan. _You bought this monstrosity?_ he asks, and Charles winces slightly. "You're just saying that to make the deadline too late."

"I wouldn't do that," he says. _It wanted to be driven!_

 _You impulse-bought us a minivan and made it sentient_ , Erik thinks a little experimentally, to see whether the words fit. It turns out they do, and Charles blushes an appealing shade of pink at not being able to refute the accusation.

He doesn't know how these things happen to him, except he does: has known every single day of the past months where he's woken up and decided to stay, or looked at his bed and decided to sleep in it just one more night, because as much as he might make fun of Charles's ability to anthropomorphise things, the bed seemed to want him to sleep in it. Every time he'd looked at Charles and thought, _if he won't make me, then I won't leave_. He never claimed he wasn't selfish, even if Charles seems to be chronically willing to ignore it.

 _I don't ignore it_ , Charles says gently. _But I see the good things too, all the ones you ignore._

 _I don't ignore my good qualities,_ Erik thinks at him. He's well practiced in projecting now, at Emma's insistence, but he hardly ever needs to project for Charles; the other man likes to stay inside his mind anyway, a little part of his consciousness curled up and resting, so that Erik hardly ever needs to do anything to get his attention. He's not sure he quite understands how relaxing Charles finds his mind, has made multiple efforts to soften his thinking in an abstract sort of way that he probably couldn't even begin to explain to anyone, but Charles always murmurs about how everything in his mind is lovely, even the sharpest parts.

 _I suppose we're even, then_ , Charles thinks, an undercurrent of amusement in his thoughts. Erik shakes his head, but reaches out to link their hands anyway.

"As long as it works, I suppose," he says. _And it's very different_.

 _Different how?_ Charles asks, while saying, "Of course it very well works, Erik, I wouldn't've gone and bought a machine that doesn't work."

 _Maybe don't look_ , Erik thinks, but doesn't attempt to shield the memories if Charles wants to go searching for them.

(He'd driven a much smaller, sleeker car to a beach, shortly after the war had ended, stolen and hotwired with his abilities in the middle of the night and two hundred kilometres away before anyone would've realised it was missing. The Nazi he'd been hunting, at the time, had been living in a posh beach house, bought with money whose origins Erik did not want to think about.)

"I still don't understand how you could just go and impulse-buy a monstrosity like this," he says.

"You don't think it's a monstrosity," Charles replies. "You like it." Erik can feel a touch of Charles's regret, in his mind, and sadness, and probably what Charles would want him to label commiseration, before he draws a sort of mental curtain around the images from Erik's past, gentle closure that Erik could resist, if he wanted to; he doesn't, and allows the conversation to return to the minivan in front of them, who is preening at all the attention she is being given.

"Tell anyone and I won't be responsible for my actions," Erik warns, and Charles grins, tilts his head up to meet Erik's eyes, locks of hair falling over his forehead. Erik raises his hands to cup his face, kissing him gently just because he can, because he wants to and Charles isn't telling him not to, because he adores the way that smile looks on Charles's face.

The minivan makes an alarmingly, terrifyingly loud noise that makes Charles jump and Erik tense and go entirely still, and Alex climbs out of the driver's side, having somehow managed to get in from the other side without being noticed. "Sweet!" he says brightly. "Is it ours now?"

"It is," Charles says, having somehow moved terribly far away from Erik while Alex had been occupied with the sliding door. "I take it you like it?" _Don't be so dramatic, it's probably not even a metre_ , he sends to Erik. "It's probably past time we had a sturdy machine that can take us places." _Still too far away_ , Erik sends, as Alex says, "You take right," and ambles off, presumably to tell someone else about the minivan Charles has managed to impulse-buy for them.

***

"I still think we would've gotten here with my directions."

"The question isn't whether we would've gotten here," Erik says, exaggeratedly patient in order to maximise the effect of his next line, "the question is more about how _long_ it would've taken."

"I resent that implication," Charles says, but he sways over the gearstick a little bit towards Erik, so clearly he and Erik have very different versions of resentment.

"Sweet!" Sean says, perking up from where he's next to the window. "We're here!"

"We're HERE!" Ororo cheers as Erik parks the minivan and unlocks the doors. He is almost surprised at the speed at which everybody piles out of the car. "We're at the _beach_!"

"That we are," Charles agrees brightly, going round the back to open the trunk and help Ororo take out the multiple blankets, baskets, and bottles that have all somehow fit into the back of the van. Watching them critically, Erik comes to the only natural conclusion one can come to in his situation: the already-overwhelming amount of beach equipment Charles had declared absolutely necessary and shoved into the trunk had, somehow, multiplied over the course of the drive.

"Where should we get set up?" Charles asks, and is promptly assaulted on all sides by teenagers and children who all have a different spot in mind, and whose spot is invariably the best.

In the end, they're forced to agree with Ororo's proposal of "under that palm tree, right over there, and next to that big rock," partly because she has the second-deadliest plaintive look in the group (the first being Charles, who is not currently using it in any case) but also, admittedly, because it looks like the best proposal out of all of them.

"This isn't so bad, is it?" Charles asks, ten minutes of setting up and five minutes of silence as all the teenagers flock into the ocean, Angel holding Ororo's hand tightly. Erik turns to look at him, and _fuck_ but he looks good. It's so overwhelming, somehow, to be made to look and jut _feel_. The sky's cloudless, and a ridiculous shade of blue that should've by all accounts dimmed the colour of Charles's eyes but instead somehow enhances them, endless morning-glory depths that Erik should not feel like he could drown in when there is a literal ocean right beside him.

"No," Erik says softly. He knows this is the answer Charles so wants to hear, something Charles want for him, and he also knows, with a shatteringly bone-deep certainty, that it's the true answer as well: not necessarily because the bad memories he's associated with beaches over time have disappeared but because Charles makes them more bearable, lets him focus on what he has now instead of what happened in a place too much like this one. "It's not so bad."

"I'm glad," Charles says, reaching out, and the space between them is altogether too large and ridiculous anyway, so it only makes sense for Erik to reach right back and tuck their bodies close together and tangle their fingers, because nobody's paying any attention to them. "I love you," he says once his head is comfortably situated on Erik's shoulder and their noses pressed together.

"I love you too," Erik murmurs, every word and syllable and letter a fucking miracle all on its own. His heart feels three sizes too big for him, urgent and restless and disbelieving and holding so much love Erik doesn't know how it can keep beating through the ache in his chest. It scares him, sometimes, the depths of what he can feel. He'd thought the wells and reserves of those feelings had dried up long ago, channels redirected to the anger that had fuelled him for so long. Apparently Charles can reverse a drought, help Erik's heart recover from a famine, with nothing more than his own self, freely offered.

"Tell me again," Charles says, a tiny smile playing around the corners of his mouth. When Erik looks down, focuses on him, he blushes and ducks his head a little, biting those perfect lips as the smile threatens to grow larger.

Erik obliges, because at this point he's not sure he could deny Charles anything. "I love you," he says, and then says it again, because Charles needs to hear the important things vocalised. Erik'd found this out on the first night that he'd said 'I love you,' to Charles, who'd stared at him with wide eyes until Erik had begun to feel uncomfortable; as soon as he'd become conscious of the feeling, Charles had nearly thrown himself at Erik.

"I love you too, oh, I love you," he'd said. He'd been shaking a little, eyes wide and a little bit wet. "I just - oh, darling, say it again, out loud, please, just once -"

Erik had said it again several times, in multiple languages, pushing everything he'd been feeling at Charles as strongly as possible, pinning him down and repeating it between kisses until Charles had been breathing in short, shallow gasps underneath him, eyes glassy and hands twisting the sheets beyond repair.

Erik had asked about the out-loud stipulation later, when they'd been relaxed and holding each other, exhausted and sated and glowing a little, probably.

"It's not - it's just -" he'd broken off and blushed a little when Erik threatened him against dismissing it. It wasn't hard to see that he'd been affected by something about what had just happened. "People - what they think and what they say - there's a dissonance. It's incredibly common to think things that you don't mean in the slightest, or didn't even intend to think, so I just. It's better, for me, if you - say things. And mean them, obviously, I know it sounds strange for a telepath to like verbal declarations, but I just - I like it? Oh god, stop me talking please -"

"It doesn't sound strange," Erik'd murmured. "Not when you put it like that. I love you." _I love you_ , he'd added mentally, pushing that sentiment towards Charles, who'd sent back almost the exact same emotion that Erik is experiencing now, lying on the beach with his universe in his arms.

"I love you," he says a third time, and kisses Charles's nose, just to see the smile he gets in return. Like a transaction, he muses, except there is nothing mercenary about this: lying on the beach together, exchanging kisses and thoughts and memories and occasionally tearing themselves out of their own small bubble to make sure that the children are doing alright in the ocean.

(He doesn't know what it is, what reminds him, but the thought still comes: on a beach very like this one, he'd deflected a bullet and then, worse, nearly walked away from his entire world. He doesn't know what he'd've become, if he hadn't heard that beloved voice behind him, shaky and fragile and all the more wrong for it, because for all that he seemed young, Charles was neither shaky nor fragile: _I can't feel my legs…_ He doesn't like to think about it.)

"Darling," Charles murmurs, a touch of sadness in that velvet voice. "I thought we'd be able to avoid this." Erik doesn't reply, only pushes away, a little, undeserving of the stars and galaxies that offer themselves to him so freely. "Please don't push me away," Charles says, soft, and that is enough to make Erik's arms tighten around him again. "You came back. Erik, you came back to me. You stayed, you've been staying. One moment doesn't condemn you."

"And what would you have that moment be, if not a condemnation?" Erik asks, voice bleak and throat sore with it.

"Redemption," Charles says softly. "You came _back_. You're - you've been staying."

Erik doesn't believe he deserves redemption. _You do_ , Charles insists in his mind. _You've earned it, already, a hundred times over_. Probably because he doesn't want to think about it, Erik notices Charles's phrasing for the first time.

"I've _been_ staying?" he asks, frowning. "What does that - oh." Charles, suddenly sitting up, very interested in the waves, tries to move away. Erik grabs a hold of his wrist; not too tight that Charles couldn't escape, never that, but enough that Charles stops moving, lets out a breath and sways back towards Erik, as though he just can't help it. "Charles," Erik says gently, because he wants to hear it, "what does that mean?"

"I just - didn't want to make assumptions," Charles says. His voice is weak, and Erik hates it, hates the way the vibrancy has drained out of him, hates the way his shoulders have slumped and his face is turned away from Erik. "You think about leaving very often, you know. About as much as you think about staying."

"I love you," Erik says.

"I know."

"I do think about leaving. Sometimes I think I should," Erik says, gentle, and Charles turns a little further away from him at the admission, at the truth behind it. "But I don't want to leave you. I never want to leave you." He's never said it out loud, and he could kick himself for it, but then Charles turns to him and everything but the look on his face becomes unimportant, because it's the exact same wide-eyed awestruck disbelieving look that he'd worn on the night of that first love confession, and for the first time it strikes Erik that he may not be the only one doubting his worthiness of this gorgeous precious thing they have between them.

"I don’t want you to leave," Charles says finally, in a voice that wavers. "I never did. I never do. Erik -"

"Charles," Erik says, because it's the only thing he can say, as they move towards each other again. "I want to stay," he murmurs into exuberant brown curls.

"Good," Charles says. "I want years to convince you that you're good, Erik, so good, and then I want years more just to be with you."

Just to be with him. Erik, on a blanket on soft sand, looking into a blue ocean and bluer eyes, can't imagine anything better. "I want that," he says, to be perfectly clear. "I can’t imagine anything better." He's happier than he ever thought he would or could be, Charles tucked into his side, and he really can't do anything but smile helplessly when he feels that beloved smile against his skin.

**Author's Note:**

> because clearly the best time to jump into fandom is during Exam Week. yes
> 
> come talk to me on [tumblrrrr~ ](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/layersofsilences) i'm probably tolerable


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